Medical Treatment of Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma: Present Options and Future Directions

The management of patients with metastatic RCC is still frustrating because the most of these patients die of their disease. Although a limited subset of patients can experience clinically meaningful benefit from IL-2 or IFN-α therapy and a limited benefit, if any, can be achieved in these patients with conventional chemotherapy, there is no other proven effective therapy for patients who do not respond or who relapse after cytokine-based treatment. Better understanding of RCC biology has provided insights on relevant signal transduction pathways, genetic mutations, and tumour susceptibilities to innate immune response resulting in novel treatment strategies that promise to affect the natural history of this lethal disease.